Gotta replace "&" in my search results page. Can I?

[Worldbuilder]

Hello one and all,

I don't know if what I would like to do is possible or not, but if it is, I would greatly appreciate help with it.

I use a php search script for my website. Simple enough. I'm big on XHTML validation, too. Now, I realized quickly that the OUTPUT of the searches were not going to be able to be made XHTML 1.0 valid just because of the way it's written. BUT I did try to get it to validate as HTML 4.01 at least. Well, I did except for one thing.

For example, check out this page of results. It DOES validate as HTML 4.01. Cool.

However, try this results page. Basically the same page, but with a different result because of a different search. This results page does NOT validate. BUT it only doesn't validate because of "&"s in the URL's that are generated by the search. That's all. Obviously, if I could just edit the HTML it would be an easy fix, but I can't do that because the pages are php-generated.

Is there some way to edit the search.php file (which controls the output and is what I've attached as a zip file) to replace all the "&"s in URL's with "&"?

If so, could someone please show me how? I'm very much a novice with php.

Thanks!

Chris

[jimrthy]

You probably want to wrap the output in the htmlentities function.

[Worldbuilder]

You probably want to wrap the output in the htmlentities function.

Forgive me, but I have no idea what that is, or if it will accomplish what I desire. What is that, and will it?

Thanks for the reply!

Chris

[Worldbuilder]

Do you mean lines 276 - 269?

$entitiesQuery = htmlspecialchars($query);
    if ($result==0)
        print "<table width=\"100%\" class =\"resultReport\"><tr><td>".$sph_messages["The search"]." \"$entitiesQuery\" ".$sph_messages["noMatch"].".</td></tr></table>"; 

Will something in this code help me? Is there a way for me to tell the script to put an "&" wherever it encounters an "&"?

Chris

[metacube]

Yeah, that's what htmlentities() does.
Wherever you output something to the page, pass it through htmlentities() to change th & to &